Language more normally suited to wartime is commonly invoked around the Covid-19 pandemic, but can we learn anything from past conflicts in our battle against coronavirus?
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In January 1941, Winston Churchill gave a sombre address to the House of Commons, the UK’s parliament. “Our Empire and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley,” he remarked in one of World War Two’s bleakest periods. “But I should be failing in my duty if, on the other wise, I were not to convey the true impression, that a great nation is getting into its war stride.”

Comparisons between World War Two and the current coronavirus pandemic are prolific. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been compared to a wartime president, has peppered his daily briefings with combative language, describing the apex of the disease’s curve as “the next battle at the top of the mountain”, and proclaiming “ventilators are to this war what bombs were to World War Two”.

European leaders, meanwhile, talk of an inevitable “D-Day” when the outbreak will overwhelm the hospital system, and allude to war with an invisible enemy. Healthcare workers are on the frontlines, scientists are the new generals, economists draw up battle plans, politicians call for mobilisation. Just a few weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth II urged Britons to adopt the same discipline and resolve that the people had showed during WWII. “It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made in 1940, helped by my sister,” the monarch recalled during a rare televised address.

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The coronavirus pandemic, though different from the war in many crucial respects, seems to demand some of the same measures used during that global emergency. From boosted production to rapid redeployment of resources, increased governmental oversight and stimulus plans to potential rationing, 2020’s battle against a virus might force great nations to once again adopt their war strides.

Are there lessons we can learn from the collective anxiety, the contingency measures, the calls for national cohesion and the dramatic changes to society that defined WWII? Is there is a fallacy in the modern conception of the immediate “united front” – a fallacy that will continue to play out against the backdrop of the pandemic? What does shared sacrifice look like, and how will it shape our future this time around?

The spirit of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill is often invoked by those urging the adoption of measures against coronavirus (Credit: Getty Images)

The spirit of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill is often invoked by those urging the adoption of measures against coronavirus (Credit: Getty Images)

The extent to which wartime psychology is relevant to our understanding of the coronavirus pandemic is, like the trajectory of the disease itself, unclear and rapidly evolving. When politicians (or journalists) reach for convenient parallels between the pandemic and those wartime battles, they may make dangerous assumptions. Comparisons that rely on militarisation, organised violence or the threat of civilian control aren’t useful, and can even be harmful, especially as new information becomes available and data changes by the hour.

“If we mount a war on coronavirus, that doesn’t solve fundamental problems in the healthcare system or in global trade, for example,” says Mark R Wilson, professor of history at the University of North Carolina. “We constrain our imagination by thinking about a short-run war mobilisation.” Insidious global problems such as equipment shortages, health care disparities, lack of emergency protocols, confusion between federal and local policies, poverty and societal inequity can’t be neatly addressed by a rapid offensive against Covid-19, even if that battle is metaphoric. “There is no automatic formula for what happens during and after a crisis,” Wilson adds. “But right now, people can and should still take an interest in the past.”

Neurosurgeons, cardiologists, medical students– all have been pulled into emergency rooms and intensive care wards

During World War Two, a dire need to radically accelerate the output of items such as ships, tanks and bombers led to a mobilised wartime economy. The United States and Great Britain, in particular, converted existing factories that once made civilian products into those that could produce military equipment. Car manufacturers built army trucks instead; clock companies and plumbing industrialists designed ammunition cartridges; silk stockings were repurposed for parachutes.

Over the past month we’ve once again seen this phenomenon of conversion, as companies across the globe repurpose production lines in an effort to turn the tide of the outbreak. In just 72 hours, luxury brand Louis Vuitton began manufacturing hand sanitiser with alcohol normally used in its perfume distillery, which it then distributed to hospitals across France. General Motors, the US auto manufacturer that mass-produced tanks in World War Two, has pivoted once again, this time producing thousands of ventilators, while clothing retailers in the UK have turned from fashion to manufacturing in-demand surgical N-95 masks.

The war also spurred massive social changes, such as the development of universal health care in countries including the UK (Credit: Getty Images)

The war also spurred massive social changes, such as the development of universal health care in countries including the UK (Credit: Getty Images)

Airlines across the globe have begun chartered flights to repatriate stranded nationals abroad and transport health care workers and medical supplies to deeply impacted regions. Hospital ships such as the USNS Comfort, designed to treat casualties of war, now offer a relief valve for hospitals overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients.

This redeployment calculus applies not just to goods and services but to human capital as well. Neurosurgeons, cardiologists, medical student – all have been pulled into emergency rooms and intensive care wards. Receptionists who normally deal with billing are suddenly tasked with screening coronavirus patients, making up for an acute shortage of personnel. Restaurant workers prepare and deliver meals in bulk to exhausted emergency care nurses, parents have become full-time teachers to their children, hotel managers are being trained in hospital protocol as they open their doors to health care workers.

During World War Two, the measures used to ramp up production took months to implement; today, it would appear that we had not months, but weeks. And our current efforts seem patchwork at best. World War Two’s unprecedented mobilisation effort, by contrast – its dramatic output, profit control and federal regulation – might serve as a blueprint during the next phase of the coronavirus outbreak. As they did during the war, officials could opt to fund brand new factories and equip them with machinery and tools (in this case, ventilators or personal protective gear).

The short-term financial cost of these measures would be enormous, but the payoff could be too

By establishing dedicated Covid-19 facilities rather than converting existing ones, governments would expand capacity and absorb risk. Over the next several months, these factories could implement production lines to speed the creation of antibody tests and a vaccine. And authorities could further regulate the crisis standard of care – allocating treatment to certain patients – and ration medical equipment or even food.

The short-term financial cost of these measures would be enormous, but the payoff could be too. Indeed, rapid government intervention in the months following the coronavirus outbreak has already shown signs of success. In China, for example, thousands of workers built a field hospital on government orders; modular construction and rapid mobilisation meant that thousands more Covid-19 patients could be treated in a matter of days.

Federally mandated social distancing has also worked to compress the timeline – a kind of individual sacrifice reminiscent of wartime strain on the home front. World War Two’s iconic message of “equality of sacrifice,” emphasised by labour leaders and union officials and propagated through steep progressive taxes and government regulations, would be hard to sustain in today’s political and financial landscape. But in recent weeks, people have shown a desire to comply, even to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.

During World War Two, factories which had once made cars were quickly reorganised to make weapons such as these British bombers (Credit: Getty Images)

During World War Two, factories which had once made cars were quickly reorganised to make weapons such as these British bombers (Credit: Getty Images)

“People are turning to war as a metaphor because of the mobilising aspects of war,” says Mary L Dudziak, a law professor at Emory University who has published widely on the concept of wartime in US history. “But a pandemic is not a ‘war’. A country responds to war by killing other people: death is the means of war. In a pandemic, the means of responding is not killing other people but instead trying to preserve life.”

The desire to comply, to make personal sacrifices, these are no longer for the purpose of destruction, but for a greater good that is truly good: mutual assistance across nations and the safeguarding of human life

“Moments of crisis can provide opportunities for reform,” says Wilson. World War Two brought national healthcare reforms, gave rise to international organisations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, and in the US led to the introduction of the GI Bill, which detailed important benefits for soldiers returning from war.

There will be no “return to normalcy” after the coronavirus pandemic

Of course, not all reforms at the time were sweeping in scope. While the UK’s universal health care system, the National Health Service (NHS), emerged out of World War Two, the US ended up with a far less robust system; many were left uninsured. The coronavirus crisis might bring about similar reforms; for example, targeted compensation packages for health care workers or grocery store staff. Or it might engender an entirely restructured economy, resulting in universal health care or increased job security. At the very least, we can expect to see a new generation of political leaders and thinkers to come out of it.

Consider the scientific experts now on the front lines. Just as generals take the lead in giving daily briefings in wartime, medical experts like Anthony Fauci are at the microphone to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs. Healthcare professionals are perhaps the new wartime generals.

After World War Two, much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. The figures are difficult to grasp – nearly 60 million dead. Indeed, 1945 has often been referred to as Year Zero: a new way to mark time before and after the war’s destruction. People the world over confronted a landscape that had been changed forever, marked by deprivation but also by hope. Government expenditures helped bring about the business recovery that had eluded President Roosevelt’s New Deal .

While the industrial conversion hasn't been as dramatic as turning tractor factories into tank plants, it has been widespread and rapid (Credit: Getty Images)

While the industrial conversion hasn't been as dramatic as turning tractor factories into tank plants, it has been widespread and rapid (Credit: Getty Images)

Throughout the US and Europe, wartime mobilisation and ingenuity secured employment and a fairer distribution of income, while creating entirely new technologies, industries and associated human skills. Old ideological constraints collapsed, but new ideas about capital, entrepreneurship, and social bonds emerged. These extraordinarily ambitious efforts – civilian and federal, at home and abroad – meant that nations could ultimately recover.

To misquote a post-war US presidential candidate, there will be no “return to normalcy” after the coronavirus pandemic. From the comfort of our homes, we may sit and leaf through the pages of history, imagining various after-lesson actions – but we know for certain only that nothing can be certain.

Yet, this crisis has arguably spurred mobilisation on an international scale not seen since the war 80 years ago. The pandemic demands quick crash efforts with high stakes, has united people across the world, and promises to accelerate seismic global changes which could last for years to come.

Then, as now, we might take some courage in the Queen’s wartime vow: “We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.”

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A picture may say a thousand words, but what if the photograph has been fabricated? There are ways to spot a fake – you just have to look closely enough.

BBC Future has brought you in-depth and rigorous stories to help you navigate the current pandemic, but we know that’s not all you want to read. So now we’re dedicating a series to help you escape. We’ll be revisiting our most popular features from the last three years in our Lockdown Longreads.  

You’ll find everything from the story about the world’s greatest space mission to the truth about whether our cats really love us, the epic hunt to bring illegal fishermen to justice and the small team which brings long-buried World War Two tanks back to life. What you won’t find is any reference to, well, you-know-what. Enjoy.

Take a look at the photograph below – it’s just an ordinary picture of two people outside a building, right? One of them appears to be handing something to the other.

Now take a closer look. Not everything in this picture is as it seems.

Two men exchanging some documents outside? Not necessarily (Credit: James O’Brien and Hany Farid)

Two men exchanging some documents outside? Not necessarily (Credit: James O’Brien and Hany Farid)

The tell-tale signs may not jump out at you, but to Hany Farid, the image is littered with evidence – one of the reflections in the window is misaligned and the shadows do not line up.

This photograph is a fake. One of the men was not there at all.

Research suggests that regardless of what you might think about your own abilities to spot a hoax, most of us are pretty bad at it. Farid, however, looks at photographs in a different way to most people. As a leading expert in digital forensics and image analysis, he scrutinises them for the almost imperceptible signs that suggest an image has been manipulated.

If a photo has been tampered with, the shadows of some objects in the image may not match the light sources in the rest of the picture

One trick he has picked up over time is to check the points of light in people’s eyes. “If you have two people standing next to each other in a photograph, then we will often see the reflection of the light source (such as the Sun or a camera flash) in their eyes,” he explains. “The location, size, and colour of this reflection tells us about the location, size, and colour of the light source. If these properties of the light source are not consistent, then the photo may be a composite.”

Another giveaway is the colour of people’s ears. “If the Sun is behind me, my ears will look red from the front because you’ll see the blood,” he says. “If the light is coming from the front, you won’t see the red in the ear.”

But Farid also has some more scientific tools at his disposal. As the chair of computer science at Dartmouth College, he has been studying how to spot photographs that have been manipulated for decades.

Some other types of fake are easier to spot, like this Time magazine cover that was found displayed in the US President's golf clubs (Credit: Washington Post/Twitter)

Take shadow, for example. If you draw a line from the edge of a shadow in a photograph, to a point on the object that is casting the shadow, you can trace that further to reveal where the light in an image is coming from. If you map out several points on a shadow, the lines should intersect.

If a photo has been tampered with, the shadows of some objects in the image may not match the light sources in the rest of the picture, says Farid. He has shown it is possible with this method to identify images that have had objects or people added after they were taken.

Tracing the reflections in an image can make it easy to spot fakes if they don’t line up (Credit: James O’Brien and Hany Farid)

Tracing the reflections in an image can make it easy to spot fakes if they don’t line up (Credit: James O’Brien and Hany Farid)

Similarly, reflections like those in the image at the start of this article are also a giveaway. Again, by tracing a line from the person or object creating the reflection and their mirror image, they should all converge at a single point somewhere behind the reflective surface. If they do not, then something has been doctored.

In today’s world, fake images have implications for everything from politics to medicine.

“There isn’t an election that goes by where you don’t see fake photographs in one form or another,” says Farid. “Images will be manipulated to make a candidate look better. They might create these crowds to add diversity so the candidate doesn’t look like a racist, or use composites to show their opponents in a negative light.”

For example, when a picture was “unearthed” during the 2004 presidential election showing then candidate and Vietnam war veteran John Kerry sitting next to Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally in 1970, at least one prominent newspaper referred to the image, which spread across the internet. It later turned out to be a composite made from two different images. 

This photo of politician John Kerry was designed to mislead (Credit: Fourandsix.com)

This photo of politician John Kerry was designed to mislead (Credit: Fourandsix.com)

Faked pictures are clearly not a new phenomenon, and indeed BBC Future has reported on their ubiquity before. In 2012, for example, we published a guide to fake images of Hurricane Sandy which were doing the rounds at the time. You may well have seen the dramatic, but fake, images of supercell storm clouds swirling above the Statue of Liberty. BBC Future writer Rose Eveleth has also reported on the way that fake images affect memories.

Doctored images emerged as Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012

Doctored images emerged as Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012

In fact, doctored images have been used since the early days of photography. Even a famous portrait of US President Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as a composite, with the president’s head added onto the body of another politician (see below). The ubiquity of digital cameras and photo editing software has made the issue more troublesome than ever.

(Credit: Library of Congress)

Even governments are not above releasing manipulated images – Iran famously released a picture of a missile test in 2008 where one that had likely failed to launch had been made to look as if it had worked with some creative copy and paste (see below). When photographs from places like North Korea, Iraq and Syria are used to help governments make crucial security decisions, their veracity must be verified wherever possible, warns Farid.

Iran’s show of military might in 2008 was doctored to remove a launcher which failed to fire – and replaced with a fourth projectile. (Courtesy: Fourandsix.com)

Iran’s show of military might in 2008 was doctored to remove a launcher which failed to fire – and replaced with a fourth projectile. (Courtesy: Fourandsix.com)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which develops technology for the US military, is attempting to create a tool that will automatically detect the manipulation of images and videos and assess their integrity. Farid is working as a researcher on one of the Darpa teams along with Kevin Conner, who co-founded image analysis firm Fourandsix with Farid in 2011. They have licensed their tool izitru, which looks at how a file is packaged and helps determine if an image came directly from the camera, to the agency.

When photographs from places like North Korea, Iraq and Syria are used to help governments make crucial security decisions, their veracity must be verified wherever possible

“The challenge is that the technology is not at the stage where you can feed in any random image and get back some unequivocal answer,” says Conner, who worked at Adobe for 16 years and spent much of that time working on Photoshop. “It may not be possible to really get to that point, but that is essentially what Darpa is trying to do.”

By themselves, though, humans are exceptionally poor at identifying untrustworthy images. A recent study from Stanford University, for example, demonstrated that students from middle school to college struggle to analyse whether things they read online are credible. In one exercise, students were shown a photograph of what were supposedly “Fukushima Nuclear Flowers”, similar to the image below, posted to a website without credentials. Of the 170 high school students who saw the image, less than 20% successfully questioned the source of the photo.

This effect is not due to radiation, it's actually a natural process called fasciation (Credit: Candiru/Flickr/PD)

This effect is not due to radiation, it's actually a natural process called fasciation (Credit: Candiru/Flickr/PD)

Even if we are sceptical of the source of an image, we are still bad at eye-balling inconsistencies. In one study conducted at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, for example, participants were presented with a series of photos and asked if they had been manipulated. While some of them were not altered in any way, more than half had been spliced (meaning that they were a composite of multiple photos), had areas that had been erased, or contained areas that were copied and pasted from the same image. Participants were only able to spot the fakes about 47% of the time.

Victor Schetinger, a doctoral candidate who worked on the study, says friends and colleagues regularly ask him about the legitimacy of photos. “All my research has informed me to conclude that I can’t tell (them) by examining a photo visually,” he says. “A lot of things can happen with an image that can leave artefacts and create something very visually striking. For example, maybe the image was saturated, maybe there was a strange flash, maybe a piece of dust on the lens. People will suspect it’s fake, but you shouldn’t assume that’s the case.”

This photo of Barack Obama circulated in 2008, but is fake - the clock is a clue, a reference to a Hillary Clinton TV ad about picking up the phone at 3:00 (Credit: Snopes)

This photo of Barack Obama circulated in 2008, but is fake - the clock is a clue, a reference to a Hillary Clinton TV ad about picking up the phone at 3:00 (Credit: Snopes)

If you’re curious about your ability to spot the difference between real images and those that have been Photoshopped, Adobe has put together a little online quiz. When I took it, I guessed correctly 15 out of 25 times, or about 60% of the time.

“More often than not, people think that the real images are fake and that things that are fake are real,” says Farid. “And their confidence is very high. So people are both ignorant and confident, which is the worst combination.”

The solution is to turn to computers to spot the inconsistencies that humans can miss. Photographic forensics uses a battery of techniques and algorithms to identify fake photos, many of which examine whether images fit with the laws of physics. While it may never be possible to authenticate a photograph to 100% confidence, forensics specialists can test photos using a number of techniques.

Let’s look at a famous photograph that has had conspiracy theorists whispering for decades.

This picture of Lee Harvey Oswald has often been claimed by conspiracy theorists to be a fake (Credit: Warren Commission/Wikipedia Commons) 

The photo above is of Lee Harvey Oswald, the former US Marine who assassinated President John F Kennedy in 1963. According to authorities, the photo was taken in Oswald’s backyard and sent to his friend in April 1963. Investigators used it as evidence of Oswald’s guilt after matching markings from the rifle in the image to the gun found in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, after the assassination. Questions over the authenticity of the photo have fueled conspiracy theories that Oswald was framed for the assassination by the government, or criminal groups, particularly because Oswald himself denied the photo was real and was killed by a gunman before he could stand trial.

Conspiracy theorists have pointed to a few features in the picture as “evidence” of tampering – the shadows, particularly those on Oswald’s face, appear to some as if they are cast from a different light source than the shadows of other objects in the photo. Oswald’s chin looks broader than in his mugshot while his stance supposedly looks odd given the weight of the gun while others dispute the length of the gun itself in the image.

Farid and his colleagues examined the photo in a series of papers published in 2009, 2010 and 2015. In their analyses, researchers built 3D models of the scene and of Oswald based on his mugshot, his known height and weight, and the weight of the gun. They found that the shadows in the scene were consistent with a single light source, with the shadows on his face accounting for the appearance of a broader chin than that in his mug shot.

They also found that his posture was plausible given his centre of mass and the way he was carrying the gun, and estimated that the length of the rifle in the photo, after accounting for perspective, was 40.186in (101.2cm) long, less than an inch shorter than the length reported by the manufacturer. In all, the researchers couldn’t find any evidence of photo tampering.

Hany Farid and his team showed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s stance in the photograph was entirely plausible and so conclude the photo was genuine (Credit: Hany Farid)

Hany Farid and his team showed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s stance in the photograph was entirely plausible and so conclude the photo was genuine (Credit: Hany Farid)

“So this is a good example of the failure of our visual system to reason correctly,” says Farid. “You can’t really fault it because at first glance, some aspects of the photo do look weird. This is an interesting example where the forensic science can show that things that people are pointing to are not actually inconsistent with reality – they are all perfectly physically plausible.”

Other methods of authentication have nothing to do with the content of an image, but rather how its data file is packaged by the software that encodes it. When an image comes off a phone or camera, for example, it is often packaged as a jpeg file, which uses a type of lossy compression. Ordinarily there can be a lot of data in a photograph, so to reduce the size of digital files, some of the information is discarded (hence “lossy”) based on certain algorithms that make the file smaller. In addition, there is metadata associated with the image, with information about when the image was taken, what camera was used, how the thumbnail should look, and even the location where it was captured.

“There’s no such thing as a single jpeg format,” explains Farid. “Every camera compresses by different amounts. An iPhone compresses a lot more than a high-end SLR, for example. Even a point-and-shoot camera has different quality settings, and the way they create the thumbnails or store the metadata is a little different. All those things get embedded into a file.”

Law enforcement agencies often use this to help verify whether a picture has been altered since it was downloaded from the camera. “When you look into the packaging of a jpeg using code – the order in which all the bits of information are ordered are very specific and are very different for Photoshop versus an iPhone versus Panasonic or Nikon,” explains Farid. “So we can look at the packaging of a file and say this has gone through Photoshop because there are these tell-tale signs.”

It is still possible, however, for a photograph to be manipulated and the data reordered to look authentic, but it’s difficult to do. Farid compares it to trying to repackage an item like a new computer after you have taken it out of the box it came in.

“The way the package is wrapped with the Styrofoam, etc,” he explains. “If you try to take it all apart and put it back together, it would be very difficult to get it to look the exact same way. Hiding [file manipulation] is the digital equivalent of that. You can do it if you try really hard but it’s almost impossible, and you nearly always make mistakes.”

By tracing a line from a shadow in an image back to a light source, it is possible to see if something has been added to a picture (Credit: Hany Farid)

By tracing a line from a shadow in an image back to a light source, it is possible to see if something has been added to a picture (Credit: Hany Farid)

Despite this, Farid emphasises that forensic techniques do not guarantee fake photos can be spotted. They are, however, creating an arms race between hoaxers and those working in the forensic community.

“They raise the bar for the level of difficulty and skill required to create a compelling fake,” says Farid. “My hope is that when you run a photo through 20 or so different forensic techniques, and every single one, from the packaging to the shadows to the colour to the noise is completely consistent, it is more likely that the photo is real.”

So what can the rest of us do to spot those pesky fake images circulating on the internet? While we might not be able to use the full range of forensic techniques at Farid’s disposal to spot inconsistencies in images, there are other ways we can examine photos more critically. Reverse image searches (which can be done at sites like tineye.com or Google Images) are a good way to find out if a specific image has already been revealed as a fake. Reputable sites like snopes.com also vet viral images.

Farid also suggests looking at the source of the image. “Photos published on mainstream and reputable news sites like the New York Times have a high likelihood of being real as compared to photos published on unknown media sites, blogs, or Facebook,” he says.

Yet even supposedly reliable news organisations can get duped by a good photo. Often the best course of action is to ask yourself if a photo is simply too good to be true.

“A healthy amount of scepticism is always required when consuming digital images,” urges Farid. “But don’t let that scepticism overwhelm you as it is just as easy to think that a real photo is fake, as the other way around.”  

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